New Year's Resolution

I have finally decided on a good New Year’s Resolution for myself.

I am going to keep track of my personal savings spending. This is not really a budget. i might make that later. This is just a plan to keep track of all the money I spend daily. That includes things like my lunches, snacks, pencils and other stationary, and any other miscellaneous expenses.

As I explored in Resolutions, where I shared some of my personal goals for the year, I've come to realize that increasing my willpower is a key area for improvement. This comes from the Willpowered website blog at where number seven says,

KEEP TRACK OF YOUR SPENDING The Willpowered website blog at where number seven says, 'KEEP TRACK OF YOUR SPENDING' - I think this is related to what I discussed in Resolutions about keeping track of daily expenses. There is also the curiosity factor. I am curious about how much I really am spending, though I don’t think it is that much. Then later, I might use this to make a budget but that is not my main intention.

While preparing a lesson on new year's resolutions for one of my students, I stumbled upon an idea that resonated with me - keeping track of daily expenses. It seemed like a good idea and simple. I like simple things.

I'm also intrigued by the concept of dual entry bookkeeping, which I touched on briefly in An End to the Frustration - it's an area I'd like to explore further and apply to my own financial management. I didn’t want to set up the whole system myself, and I found this great package that uses laravel. It is at firefly. The firefly system here was free and pretty comprehensive yet I did not need to try to hook up to my bank accounts… I don’t like that idea much. It also forces me to put in all the entries myself which is the willpower part. My resolution is to do it for one full year. After a year, I can abandon it or keep going as I see fit.

Another cool thing was it said I should run it on a TLS enabled site. I don’t have any certificates and wanted to experiment with them but I did not want to spend the money. I also don’t want to scare people away from any of my sites with self signed certificates.

On this site, Related to what I discussed in An End to the Frustration, setting up a secure connection using HTTPS can be a relatively painless process - as you can see from this guide on How to Create an SSL Certificate on Nginx for Ubuntu 14.04. I have already set it up. Setting up https was actually a breeze!!

I used the guide for How to Create an SSL Certificate on Nginx for Ubuntu 14.04 and it was really easy. I finished it in just a matter of minutes. I really recommend this page if you want to do the same thing.

Let’s see if putting in all the daily entries will be so easy…